Working with bloggers who provide honest reviews and features of a product is a smart way for brands to reach out to a new or existing audience.

Our resident blogger, Natalie, receives several pitches every day. Some of those pitches are good and some of them are terrible. You wouldn’t believe how many people just copy and paste their pitch into an email or pitch with a product that doesn’t even apply to her life or family (which is a tell tale sign that they didn’t even bother to do any research.)

These 6 tips from BlogPRWire will help you successfully pitch bloggers so that they will be excited to work with your brand! http://bit.ly/1RRXx31

In marketing and life, it’s much more effective to show rather than tell. Sure, you can tell me all day long how life changing your product or service is but I’ll be much more inclined to believe you when I continuously see it in action. That’s where content marketing comes in. Content marketing shows your audience exactly who you are, what you believe in and how it aligns with their own thoughts and beliefs. Content marketing conveys your brand’s lifestyle. Content marketing is what keeps your audience coming back for more time after time and will keep them engaged even if they’re not ready to buy.

Let’s look at a high ticket item with a super long purchase cycle as an example: real estate.

Debbie is a San Diego based realtor. She specifically works with helping young families buy their first homes in hip, urban neighborhoods. Instead of selling her families a home and then never hearing from them again, Debbie uses a comprehensive content marketing strategy to keep engaging with them and to stay top of mind. She publishes a weekly newsletter that highlights the best things to do in San Diego for young families, she features local experts on her blog and newsletter who can educate her readers about issues new homeowners may face, her Instagram is beautifully curated with images of San Diego neighborhoods, activities and sights to see. She maintains a strong relationship with local influencers who she can connect her audience with and is active across her social platforms talking about, you guessed it, the San Diego lifestyle. Debbie’s clients find tremendous value in the content she puts out and feel really connected to the community she’s created. They refer clients to her again and again and when they’ve outgrown their first homes, she’s the first person they call.

Debbie could have gone the route of repeatedly saying that she’s the best realtor in San Diego or that she truly cares for her clients, but instead she showed them, over and over again. She demonstrated her expertise in the area and painted a vivid picture of the lifestyle her brand represents. Because of her content marketing strategy, she stands out from other realtors – easy peasy.

Pro Tip: It’s so important to give back to your community. Volunteer, donate (time, money, or supplies), make a donation to a local charity, or teach a free class about something you’re an expert at. The point is, just do it. Good karma never hurt anybody.

My husband and I recently went to Las Vegas for a wedding and while driving around spotted a Raising Cane’s. Never being the ones to turn down the chance at trying new fast food, we gave it a shot. We pulled into the drive-thru, did a quick scan of the menu and discovered something interesting.

Raising Cane’s only sells chicken fingers. No burgers, no tacos, just chicken fingers. You can buy them in a variety of quantities, you can add fries and a drink, but at the end of the day, you’re going there for some chicken fingers. And they are damn good at what they do.

We often consult with clients who are concerned that their marketing isn’t moving the needle. They’re doing everything. They’re on all the platforms, they’re developing content that speaks to multiple audiences, they’re throwing everything at the wall and nothing is sticking.

Our advice? Streamline your marketing efforts so that you’re consistently selling the same thing to the same audience. You can’t be all things to all people. Focus at being the best at what you do and tell that story to a targeted audience in a way that they care about. Then do it again. Over and over. This will mean alienating some people. It might mean not being on every single social media platform. But in the end, you’ll have a streamlined, targeted marketing strategy that actually converts. There’s no substitute for that.